The Internet is transforming corporate architectures. Businesses are now recreating themselves to become more efficient and to find new business opportunities. Various technologies have emerged to assist in the automation of companies' operations. These technologies may include, for example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Employee Relationship Management (ERM), etc. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology designed to help companies to improve their interaction with customers. Effective CRM typically requires an integrated sales, marketing and service strategy, supported by CRM software that provides profiles and histories of each interaction the company has with each customer. Building an effective CRM system into a company's infrastructure is a complex and expensive task. Before deciding to make such an investment, a company needs to understand how much additional value it can realize by improving its business infrastructure and what business processes are most important to achieve the desired results.
Traditional value diagnostic tools provide value estimates to companies desiring to automate their processes. However, these value diagnostic tools typically quantify value estimates based primarily on the capability of a vendor's software and do not take into account the degree to which these capabilities are important to an organization or the level of success the organization has already achieved in these areas. In addition, traditional value diagnostic tools typically fail to provide any qualitative recommendations to illustrate how the company can capture the value outlined in the diagnostic.